Monthly Playlists by Nicholas Rhodes (AKA @NickyDigital)

July 2026: Reflecting, Not Competing

Monthly Playlists by Nicholas Rhodes (aka @NickyDigital)

Aug 01, 2026

As always, this month’s cover art was created by feeding the tracklist into an AI image generator to see what it thinks these songs look like. I remain a spectator to its decisions.

July was a heads-down month. Building things, shipping things, the kind of month where the days blur together and music isn't the event … it's the thing running underneath everything else. Which might explain why this is a shorter list than usual. 18 tracks. When you're not out looking for music, only the stuff that walks in and refuses to leave makes the cut.

And what walked in was, mostly, the past, showing up in new clothes and acting like it never left.

Listen on Spotify.

The Madonna Situation

I did not expect to spend July with a Madonna album. I'm not a Madonna scholar. I couldn't tell you the deep-cut lore, and I'm certain Confessions II is full of references to her own catalog that sailed right past me. But this is the first Madonna record I've really liked in a long time, and I've been trying to figure out why.

Here's my theory, which may be entirely a projection of where I am in my own life: for what feels like the first time in a while, she's reflecting instead of competing. Not chasing whatever a younger pop star is doing this year, not fighting for a lane, just paying homage to herself, to the rooms and the eras that made her. And the strange thing is that it makes the album more contemporary, not less. Turns out the most current thing you can do is stop pretending you weren't there.

Two of those rooms are on this playlist: "Danceteria" and "L.E.S. Girl." Songs named after nightlife geography. Danceteria closed before my time, but I spent about fifteen years of my life inside rooms exactly like the ones she's singing about. Documenting them, booking them, living in them 5-6 nights a week. So an album about what a club does to a person, written by someone looking back at it instead of trying to still be in it? Yeah. That one landed.

A Good Surprise in My Inbox

I've known the Midnight Magic folks from New York City nightlife for years and years. We've all grown up peripherally, scattered to different corners of the planet, and somehow kept in touch the way you do now: loosely, digitally, warmly.

I had literally just been going back and forth with Andrew Raposo on Instagram on a another mutual friend’s instagram post about a new job (Congrats Matt!) and then "Zeus" popped up. New Midnight Magic, unannounced, right there in my inbox. There is a specific kind of joy in getting new music from people who beamed me up in a past life and are still out there doing the thing. It closes out this playlist because that felt right.

Institutions and Repeat Offenders

The Strokes are a New York City institution, and I say that as someone who doesn't automatically love everything they put out. But the last few releases have been pretty phenomenal, and "Lonely in the Future" continues the streak. I haven't had a chance to give the full album a proper listen yet, but everything I've heard so far is working.

Some patterns I noticed only after the fact, which is usually how the good ones happen:

Beck is on this playlist twice with the new Gorillaz track and "In The Night" and he snuck onto the May list too, hiding inside a Mexican Institute of Sound track. I'm not curating a Beck series. He just keeps showing up, and at this point I've stopped questioning it.

Tepr, too: second month in a row, this time with Luca Lowe asking the eternal question ("What's the F_cking Point of Moving to LA" … a song title I did not write but could have). Add the Voyou remix of Yelle and there's a whole little French thread running through this one that traces straight back to the blog-house years. Some scenes never actually end. They just change tempo.

Moses Gunn Collective got two tracks in a row, because they arrived that way and needed to stay that way. And Lucius covering "Uncle John's Band" is exactly as pleasant as it sounds.